SpaceManCM

Hey everyone. For those who don't know me, until a couple weeks ago I was the Community Manager for Twisted, a role I held for almost 4 years. I stepped down from development in February of 2026 alongside Severity’s announcement, and remained as a Community Manager until recently. That isn’t the point of this post, but I think it’s important to factor that in as you read this. The purpose of this is to shed some light on what's been going on behind the scenes and the problems that have been faced. Most importantly though, I don’t want to just give another vague explanation. You’ve gotten plenty of those, some even from myself. I just want to give anybody who sees this some deserved transparency into Twisted and where it may be headed. I also want to preface this by saying please do not harass anybody over this. That is not my intention, and it helps nothing. The first update I worked on, 1.20, was originally targeting March 31, 2023, and ended up releasing August 21, 2023, after internal delays during development. I was brought on board near the end of development to handle final polishing and release. This was also my first time seeing behind the scenes, and I could clearly see a bottleneck on the programming side of things, and that internal deadlines had been consistently slipping for quite a while before I arrived. 1.21 proved that things were not getting better. Originally targeted sometime in October 2023, it would end up releasing about 7 months later, on May 4, 2024. To get it out at all, several features were cut including damage cleanup, additional gamepasses, and different storm modes. The initial release was unstable and required several patches over the following weeks. My work on this update included performance fixes, memory fixes, and a complete UI rework, and with it I transitioned into somewhat of an unofficial “intern programmer” role. After 1.21, a plan was drawn up for 1.22, and for once it was ambitious and exciting. We planned a brand new 50x50 baseplate map, a brand new chassis based on the open-source A-Chassis, an upgraded garage and customization system, new particle-based tornadoes, additional storm modes, and several gamepass overhauls. By mid-2025, more than a year since the last major update, it was quickly becoming clear things were not progressing at the rate they needed to be. Although the vehicles had been mostly completed, the particle tornadoes had been completely abandoned, storm modes and additional gamepasses had not even been started on, and the map was much more ambitious than previously anticipated. On June 7, 2025, an announcement was made stating that 1.22 would be released in a couple weeks, but instead with a refresh of the existing map. However, as many of you know, this simply did not happen. 1.21.1 and 1.21.2 had shipped in the meantime, adding storm changes, rocket probes, and adding the vehicles that had been previously planned for 1.22 and sat finished for months. Until this point, things had kept moving, but there's a limit to how long people will build assets for an update that has no clear path to actually releasing. Eventually work on the map and assets stalled too. With no one driving the work forward, timelines began to slip and poor communication meant the community was left in the dark. There was some resurgence near the end of 2025, however it was plagued with the same usual problems. The Christmas Update, which was intended to be a 5 day event counting down to Christmas, ended up releasing 2 days late, causing the first 3 days to be bundled into one, and the event itself was less detailed than planned. By late 2025, most of the dev team had run out of patience, and it was ultimately decided the only way to fix anything would be to start from scratch. And thus, Severity was born. 1.22 did eventually come out, nine months after it had been announced as being a couple of weeks away. It still lacked some of the features originally planned almost two years prior, including damage cleanup and storm modes. A game that has no real competition can go years without shipping updates and stay at the top. In four years, nothing about how this game is developed changed. Deadlines are missed, features are cut, announcements are not met. That was how it was before 1.22, and I don’t see anything that tells me it’s changed.